Online Time Capsule Brings History to Life
An 1839 map of the Iowa Territory, when the border with Missouri was still in dispute.
A 1908 photo of a women’s suffrage parade in Boone.
A 1945 telegram from a Holocaust refugee in Des Moines, asking a doctor in Austria about “the whereabouts of my brother . . . Last life sign October 1942.”
These eye-opening documents — and dozens more — from the Library of Congress and State Historical Society of Iowa are now available online at iowaculture.gov for teachers, students and anyone who would like to know more about Iowa history.
The stockpile of historical materials is the result of thousands of hours of research and nearly $300,000 in grant funding from the Library of Congress program called Teaching with Primary Sources. Now in its third year, the project in Iowa has grown to include 40 broad topics ranging from agriculture and the environment to school desegregation and civil rights.
“Providing educators and students with tools to discover Iowa’s rich history is key to bringing that history to life,” said Susan Kloewer, the administrator of the State Historical Society of Iowa, a division of the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs. “These multimedia documents connect students to our state’s story and show how it connects with national and international history in ways that even the best textbooks simply can’t.”
Last year, third-graders at Prairie Ridge Elementary School in Cedar Rapids used the online resources to learn about immigration. They studied an early 20th-century video of European immigrants landing at Ellis Island, along with a ship’s handwritten list of passengers, which included a family who settled in Iowa.
The students were surprised to find among the resources a color photo showing a pair of Sudanese refugees who came to Des Moines in the 1990s.
“The kids ask, ‘Does that still happen today?’” their teacher, Kim Heckart, said. “It’s important to get them to think about today’s issues and connect them to where we’ve been.”
The students’ curiosity led Heckart to bring in a guest speaker from Kirkwood Community College who helps refugees adjust to life in Iowa.
And that visit, in turn, inspired the students to focus their end-of-year projects on ways to help people feel more welcome. One group made a book to tell new students about their school. Another group produced a public-service video to welcome new residents to Cedar Rapids, with tips about restaurants and parks and a photo of the mayor.
This summer some of the students plan to attend the annual Meskwaki Powwow (Aug. 9–12 near Tama) because they learned about the Meskwaki Indians in school.
“It’s all about opening their eyes,” Heckart said. “There are people and places in Iowa that all of us should really know more about.”
At Southeast Valley Middle School in Burnside, south of Fort Dodge, Janet Wills uses the online history resources to help her students see different points of view.
“They can all read the same thing and come up with completely different conclusions,” she said.
Her students were surprised to discover that before the Civil War, some Iowans helped the abolitionist John Brown even after news had spread about his violent tactics in Kansas. The class learned how Iowans sheltered Brown and his activists during their famous journey to Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in 1859.
“Well, think about it: How did they get from Kansas to Virginia?” Wills said. “For the students, the Iowa connections have been really surprising.”
Wills is part of a statewide team who compiled historical materials for the online sets and wrote discussion questions for each topic, which tie in with new social studies standards the Iowa State Board of Education adopted last year.
“It’s been really nice to be able to tell teachers, ‘Hey, these resources were designed with the standards in mind,’” said Stefanie Wager, the social studies consultant for the Iowa Department of Education.
Wager leads the Iowa History Advisory Council, whose 2016 report suggested that “because Iowa history has been so long neglected, there is a generation of Iowa school children growing up unaware of the impressive lives of distinguished Iowans who are nationally and even internationally recognized or the ways in which important global events had important Iowa connections.”
“It is a deficiency of our own making, and we have the resources and willpower to end it,” the report concluded, calling for the teaching tools that are now available online. “The time to tell our own stories is now.”
— Michael Morain, Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs
